You can see Newark airport (just about) on the left, through the centre of the map to Jersey City and finally across to New York. Each dot represents 20 people and, as you can see, the dots are getting more compact as we reach the present date.

Colour coded for convenience, the ethnicity is as follows:

pale blue = white/Caucasian

golden-yellow = black

green = Hispanic

red = Asian/Pacific

And, no, I’m not going to jest about where the red dot on an Asian’s head comes from for fear of getting lynched, not that savvy Indians need council houses these days, anyway.

It’s a real indictment on the US economy that so many more people nowadays live below the poverty line. But if you look at many other conurbations across the ‘civilised’ world, I bet there would be a similar pattern.

From The Smoke to Stoke – heck, it’s no joke

At least there aren’t moves to ship indigenous inhabitants from The Big Apple up to Ontario. Lost me?

London families, 761 of them from Camden (they were not alone), were threatened with being shipped 200 miles up the M6 to Stoke when Welfare Reform kicks in proper.

Why? Because the cap on their benefit no longer avails them of the minimum affordable rent in The Smoke, so they’ve got to up sticks and go live somewhere more affordable.

One thing’s for certain: the gap between those who have and those who have not is only going to get wider over coming years, no matter which side of The Pond you happen to live.

This was indemnified further this week; last week, the UK Government told Civil Servants they’re no longer automatically entitled to an inflation-matching pay rise from now on. Conversely, MPs informed us this week that they’d voted to give themselves a £10,000 per year pay rise.

There’ll be a riot bigger than last summer’s before this lot passes, you mark my words.